


The Shepherd Boy

by Guede



Series: Teen Wolf Rejected Story Ideas [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Full Shift Werewolves, Gallows Humor, Incest, M/M, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-22 01:07:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9575102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Stiles has a flock of sheep and Derek and Peter want to eat them.So it’s slightly more complicated than that, but the sheep are real.  They’re not euphemisms.  Really.





	

“Derek, we’re starving,” Peter says, throwing their second-to-last log onto the fire.

It’s on the tip of Derek’s tongue to tell the other man not to bother. Their den is so cold that the dirt walls are glittering with frost, and even with all of their furs and clothes piled up on top of him, Derek is still shivering. Even though the fire’s barely a yard away, he can’t even feel it—can’t even really call it a fire, with its pitiful handful of sickly flames.

They aren’t going to freeze to death, being werewolves, but it’s going to be a miserable night, and using up that last log is just going to make sure it’s a miserable morning too, without enough fuel to heat up water for coffee. He thinks about pointing that out, but ultimately, just stuffs his head down into his chest, trying to collect a little warmth from his breath before the cold turns its moisture clammy. Mostly because when he thinks about it, he thinks that that sounds a lot like Peter, and Peter’s already complaining and doesn’t need Derek to do it for him.

Peter sighs. “Derek.”

“I noticed,” Derek mutters. “You know, what with how my stomach always feels like it’s caving in.”

For a few seconds all he hears is the desultory stir of Peter prodding the fire, and he’s almost hopeful that Peter might just drop it and let them go to sleep. But then Peter huffs and tosses away the poker so hard that the frost on the wall crackles.

“As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted,” Peter drawls, like he hadn’t left a pause on purpose for Derek to growl. “We’re starving, and if we’re going to survive the winter, we need to do something about that.”

Derek should just ignore him and try to get some rest, but when you’re tired and hungry and cold enough, your body starts revolting over the stupidest things, like just getting mad is going to give it enough energy to get anything done. He knows better, but again. “Oh, really, like what? Go try and find the damn game that’s all run off? Head back home and pick a fight with the Argents? Sure, that’s going to make us live till spring.”

“Well, if you’re happy to just freeze to death in this hole, you could do me the favor of getting out of there and not wasting the blankets,” Peter snaps.

He stalks over and his heartbeat’s angry enough that Derek twists onto hands and knees, crouched back against the wall, before sticking his head out. Peter stops just short of the bedding and his fangs are showing, his eyes are a little glowy, but mostly…mostly he looks worn out. He starts to say something, cuts it off in a frustrated snarl, and then rakes his hand back through his hair. His fingers are numb enough that one accidentally pokes near his eye and he yanks his hand down, wincing and hissing.

Then, sighing again, Peter gets down into a squat in front of Derek. He’s moving a little stiffly, Derek notes—the scars from the fire are all gone, but when he’s tired, or the weather is bad, or both, Peter starts moving like an old man.

Peter’s shivering too, clenching his jaw to keep it out of his speech, and Derek reluctantly fluffs out the edge of the furs towards the other man. “So you’ve got another idea?” he mutters.

“You say that like my ideas haven’t kept us in the land of the living these past few years,” Peter says, with about half as much lofty contempt he’d normally use. He drops to his knees and shuffles his legs into the blankets, then twists about to start stripping off his clothing.

“Yeah, and they’ve also made us about as many enemies,” Derek says, though he pushes himself up and reaches out to help the other man.

For his trouble he gets an awkward slap at the hand. He draws back and Peter shoves at his trousers, cursing when his fingers, looking rigid and blue at the tips, slip clumsily over the leather. Peter bares his fangs in a silent snarl, then presses his lips tightly together as Derek swings one of their cloaks over his shoulder. His shoulders move in one sharp, resentful jerk, and then he moves his arms so that Derek, whose fingers are slightly more thawed, can get hold of his pants.

Getting Peter naked and into the pile of bedding without exposing any body parts to the chilly air—and without them ending up mauling each other—is too complicated to do and talk at the same time, so they don’t. They just wrestle with Peter’s clothes, and then with each other’s limbs, squirming around to avoid leaving a finger or toe bare as they burrow together into the center of the bedding. Even on their worst days, neither of them hesitate to press together at night.

It’s the cold. It’s them being the only people either of them have. It’s werewolf instinct finding comfort in the smell and feel of pack nearby, even if human knowledge is that said pack is, well, Peter. And, Derek hates to admit, it’s that after years and years of the rest of the world relentlessly hunting them down, he needs at least one person who will lay a hand on him and not lift it dipped in his own blood. He needs somebody he can touch back, if he’s going to stay a man and not just be the violent animal everybody calls him.

From the way Peter tends to snuggle up these days, hand straying up to thread into Derek’s hair even when he’s trembling with rage, Derek suspects Peter feels something similar. But Peter’s Peter, even if it’s been almost two years since the man’s seriously tried to hurt him, and so Derek keeps his teeth within range of Peter’s throat once they’ve finally settled. “So what’s the idea?”

Peter tenses a little, though his fingers continue stroking through Derek’s hair. His ribcage slides up against Derek’s palm as he draws a deep breath, and when Derek slides his hand around to his back, he shifts away enough so that they’re looking into each other’s eyes rather than each other’s shoulders. “What, interested?”

“Look, I’m just—” Too hungry to want to think, Derek swallows. He drops his head and presses his cheek against the fur for a second. “Just tell me. You’re going to anyway.”

He can feel Peter’s eyes on his bared neck, moving slowly up and down its length. Then Peter makes a noise that’s half-amused, half-disgusted. “Such enthusiasm. Well, since you want to know, when I went down to the stream today, I saw smoke coming from the tower.”

Derek jerks his head up, but Peter’s no longer amused. Just watching him carefully, with that slight hunch that means Peter’s just as worried about Derek lunging at him; Peter’s probably the more skilled fighter, but Derek started off their exile in better condition and that’s never changed.

“Lightning strike? From that storm yesterday night?” Derek finally says.

One twitched brow is all Peter needs to arrow his disbelief. “Really, Derek?”

“Well, what, you think somebody’s actually living there again?” Derek mutters, dropping his head again. Something slips off of them and he feels a cold spot near his lower back, and instinctively presses away from it, into Peter. “And if they are, you think _that_ is going to help? You remember that’s called the Cursed Tower for a reason, right?”

“Yes, and believe me, I am shocked that you actually remembered something _I_ told you,” Peter says. He’s relaxing, even betraying a little surprise in his scent. He obviously was expecting a different reaction from Derek. “If nothing else, Derek, we should find out what’s going on there. And if in the meantime, there should be an opportunity…anyone traveling at this time of the year would have to have a large supply train with them.”

“Or be a suicidal idiot,” Derek says into the fur.

Peter snorts, and then snakes his arm past Derek’s side. He does something behind Derek that stops up the draft there, and then leaves his arm draped over Derek, tilting their heads together so that his words drift down into Derek’s face. “True. And if that’s the case, then that’ll be quite the windfall for us, won’t it?”

“I guess if you still think we get windfalls,” Derek says. 

He shifts his knee over, making room for Peter’s legs. The bedding shifts again and a draft must open up on Peter’s side, because Peter flinches, then pushes sharply against Derek. His mouth grazes up Derek’s cheekbone, leaving a damp streak that turns chilly so quickly Derek tries to rub it off against the side of Peter’s neck.

Peter shivers again, and then brings his arms up and closes his hands around Derek’s biceps, squeezing them roughly as Derek, smelling the change in his scent, nuzzles up under his jaw. The groan that comes out of Peter is still half-irritated, but his cock is nudging its way up the inside of Derek’s thigh, and when Derek kneads a hand down onto his buttock, Peter cants into the grip.

This is a waste of resources too, especially since Peter’s going to make them wash the soiled bedding in the icy stream, but Peter doesn’t point that out. Peter does roll them over, making Derek jerk up his legs to keep his feet covered, and then pins Derek’s head between his hands as he devours Derek’s mouth. His nails, even blunt, are sharp enough to leave stinging scratches along Derek’s hairline. For a few minutes his tongue’s enough to make Derek overlook that, but then Peter makes a vise of his thighs around Derek’s leg, grinding his cock down against Derek, and pushes too much of the furs off Derek.

So Derek rolls them back over, pushes his knees up to force Peter to fold his legs, then squeezes between them so his erection finds a snug home between Peter’s clenching buttocks. Peter rakes his sides, not quite drawing blood, and Derek bites at Peter’s shoulder and Peter drops his hands to clamp over Derek’s hips. Pulling in, not pushing away, lying back as Derek ruts up against him, rolling his cock between their bellies till he suddenly twists and come slicks up between them—Peter’s always like that, starting it and then getting Derek to finish it for him. Doesn’t matter who’s fucking who, Derek always does the work.

But it gets them a little warm. Not for long, and the meager heat’s already fleeing as, both sated, they rebuild the nest around themselves. But it’s better than nothing.

“Tower,” Derek mumbles, resting his head on Peter’s chest. “Great.”

“If it’s an evil sorcerer, you have my permission to blame me,” Peter says dryly. He twitches a last time at the furs, then lets his hand ride Derek’s back. “Though honestly, do you think that’d be any worse?”

When Peter uses that tone, past bitter and on into brittle, Derek knows it’s time to sleep. He ignores the other man. Peter huffs in irritation and then mutters to himself, but doesn’t seriously try to get a response out of Derek. But he’s still awake when Derek drifts off.

* * *

The Cursed Tower is a stupid name. The whole mountainside is cursed, not just the tower. It’s famous for being unhallowed ground, the kind of place where birds don’t sing, full of undead terrors that even werewolves flee from—unless they’re alpha-less and don’t have anywhere else to go that won’t involve being hunted down and slaughtered by other packs.

Anyway, the tower’s just part of all of that, doesn’t add anything that Derek can tell. He and Peter have been over there more times than he can count. At first they’d even lived in it, because it’s still in decent shape, with a roof and an inside well, but then they’d learned the hard way that the walls wouldn’t keep out the revenants and had had to resort to digging out a den in the middle of a rowan grove.

Peter says it was originally built by some kind of hermit mage who’d wanted to live somewhere where nobody would notice if he messed around with the dark arts. He doesn’t think the mage was the one who got the mountain cursed, since the revenants got in, but the mage was powerful enough to throw up a castle in the middle of nowhere. Only the tower and some of the old foundation is left now, but that’s still enough to get an idea of how massive it must’ve been. The tower itself is big enough to house several families.

Or, even though Derek can’t quite believe what he’s seeing, one youth and a flock of sheep. “Sheep.”

“He’s patched up those holes in the south wall,” Peter says, squinting under the hand he’s using to shade his eyes. “Not just wood, Derek, he’s mortared over the breaches.”

There’s a flock of sheep wandering around in the open space between the tower and the treeline. Fluffy, white with black heads, occasionally bleating as they scrounge at the mostly-dead grass. Animals hate the mountainside and usually only blunder into the woods when they’re forced to, or when they’re too old or sick to survive anywhere else, and even then they’re so terrified that sometimes Derek thinks they’re grateful he and Peter are killing them. But these sheep, some of them have even plopped down to chew their cud, bored looks on their faces.

“Put in a door as well, and shutters, and he must have chopped up one of the big pines for that firewood stack,” Peter goes on. He shuffles over a few feet along the cliff edge where he and Derek are crouched, then flattens down to peer at the tower again. “And judging from the amount of laundry he’s got hanging, it really is just him.”

“Sheep,” Derek says again, though he’s looking at the shepherd. This skinny kid perched atop a split-rail fence, lanky legs swinging out of the bottom of his baggy cloak. He’s got reddish-brown hair that he keeps scratching with the top of his crook—he has an actual shepherd’s crook—and looks like he hasn’t started shaving yet. “ _Sheep_.”

Peter does that tight exhale that means he’s about to smack Derek on the head, so Derek moves out of reach. So Peter twists around, about to lash out with his tongue instead, and the shepherd hops off the fence and over to a small fire with a pot set on top of it, and takes off the pot lid. At the same time, the wind shifts to blow their way and even at this distance, the smell of that _stew_.”

“Sheep,” Derek says, clutching at his groaning stomach.

Peter’s sniffing with his fingers pressed to his lips to hold back the drool. “Chicken, actually,” he mumbles thoughtfully into his hand.

They look at each other. Then they slip down the cliff, shift to wolf form, and make a beeline straight for the tower.

* * *

There isn’t snow on the ground but the recent storms have left ice patches all over the place, so thick that even their claws can’t grip on it. They’re so underfed that a broken bone would seriously tax their healing, so Derek and Peter have to go slowly.

Peter doesn’t mind, since he’s certain that the shepherd is some kind of powerful sorcerer and he wants to observe some more before they try anything. “He brought a flock of sheep all the way here and fixed up the tower in two weeks or less, since that’s the last time I went by there,” he tells Derek. “There’s no way he could’ve done that without help of some kind, and it’s obviously not the human kind.”

“I know,” Derek says, because he _can_ think past his stomach. “So he can do things. But, Peter, he did all that so he could _herd sheep_. Doesn’t that say something?”

“It says that he’s already got reasons to appreciate a wolfskin rug,” Peter says tartly, just before ordering Derek to not be stupid and vanishing into the falling night.

Derek rolls his eyes, but still, he doesn’t just go running out to jump the fence and rampage in the sheepfold. Like he and Peter discussed, while trying to pretend that their nibble of withered squirrel tail was actually food, let alone a travel snack, he slinks off around to the back of the tower, staying in the trees, while Peter goes to watch the front.

That side of the tower used to connect to the rest of the castle, and the big doorway that’d used to be there is now blocked off by a wooden shed. From the smell and the sounds, the shed is where the sheep spend the night, sleeping in fragrant hay, baa-ing sleepily to each other while their musky warmth drifts through the icy air to twist up Derek’s gut so badly that he whimpers. Then claws up some dirt in frustration, and then he makes himself creep along on his belly out of the trees, avoiding all sightlines from the brightly-lit tower windows.

There’s another fence extending out from the shed to only a few yards from the woods, and Derek wants to have a better look at the gate. But he’s barely halfway there when he hears a forlorn little bleat, followed by rattling underbrush. It’s a sheep that either got out or was left out by accident, and now it’s struggling to get to the shed, but it’s gotten trapped in a tangle of frozen heather. When the wind blows over it, Derek can smell the blood where the twigs have scratched it up.

By the time his sense catches up with him, he’s already flipped himself about and eeled five yards along the fence towards the sheep. His belly is grumbling so much that he tries to smash it to silence against the hard ground, terrified that the sheep will hear it and somehow bolt away. It’s just such a perfect set-up—the sheep’s even upwind of Derek.

Too perfect. He makes himself stop and slithers as low as he can in the grass, then listens. Not just for footsteps, or the cock of a gun, but for the other, more dangerous tricks: tripwires singing in the breeze, creaking branches laid over a pit trap, the metallic shiver of a snare. Even a shepherd so stupid he’d take up residence on a cursed mountain has to have something out there for the wolves.

The sheep keeps bleating and wrestling with the brush, a pale, writhing spot amid the growing dark. Every breeze brings Derek a fresh buffet of its delicious scent, and eventually his hunger’s too much and he starts edging forward again.

Even so, he’s careful to work in a slow circle around the sheep, moving so that when he springs on it, he’ll be springing towards the woods, not the tower. That way if he misses, or if the sheep gets in a lucky kick, he’ll have a clear escape route.

The sheep’s getting tired, and isn’t struggling as much. Its head droops and then heaves itself back up—it’s looking around more, since it’s not so distracted with freeing itself, and Derek has to hold still for a couple minutes. Then the sheep looks away and he eases up and back onto his haunches, bracing himself for a good strong lunge. If he gets the angle right, he might just be able to snap the sheep’s neck before it can cry out.

A sharp bang cuts through the air, just as Derek pushes up. His head jerks over and he sees a big lighted rectangle in the side of the shed, an open door that wasn’t there before. Then he jerks the other way, his paws slipping out from under him. He was so intent on the sheep that he didn’t even notice he’d crawled onto a big ice patch.

Derek snarls and scrabbles, trying to divert, but he can’t get any traction on the ice. The moment his weight starts to shift one way, the ice twists one of his legs to slew him around the other way, and he just ends up spinning around and around in the same spot. The sheep’s onto him now and is shrieking, throwing itself wildly against the brush so that’s clattering like a whole army of drummers, and over that he can hear a man’s voice calling out.

The ice whirls him around to face the shed and there’s a silhouetted figure against the doorway, something long and thin in one hand, and with a desperate, panicked effort, Derek flings out his forelegs, stabs his claws into _dirt_ , and then bounds blindly into the air.

When he comes down, it’s on a bumpy, stony patch that knocks the air out of him. He sprawls there, panting, his legs twitching as a dull pain slowly spreads through his breast, and that’s when Derek hears the whistling.

“Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to rescue sheep we go…there you are, you little suicidal fluffball,” says the shepherd as he comes up to the fence. The long thin thing is his staff, and he tucks that up under one arm as he hops the fence and then saunters over to the now-calm sheep. “How many times do I have to tell you, seriously, the grass is not greener. There isn’t even _grass_. It’s just haunted woods, I mean, what about that looks tasty to you?”

The shepherd points at the woods with the end of the staff. The sheep glances that way—Derek stifles a curse and tucks in his legs, thinking himself into a rock—and then it’s probably hunger hallucinations, but Derek could swear the sheep pulls its chin in towards its chest and makes a little embarrassed noise.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, you did,” the shepherd mutters skeptically. He walks around the sheep, studying the situation, and then flips the staff around and starts hooking at the heather with the bent end.

His back’s to Derek, and up close he looks even younger and skinnier. His clothes are so baggy that he has to keep flipping his sleeves off his hands, and once he yanks too hard on the staff and steps on the bottom of his own cloak, trips, and barely misses falling face-first into the sheep. When he rights himself, he chuckles nervously, glances around, and then tells the sheep he’d appreciate it if it didn’t mention that to the rest of the flock.

For some reason, trying to roll your eyes when in wolf form never really feels that comfortable. Derek thinks about shifting to two-legged so he can do that, and then he gets a grip on himself and tries to be serious. He’s still starving, and that sheep could feed him and Peter for at least a couple days, and while he’s not actually that interested in killing people, he doesn’t have to do that. He could just knock out the shepherd, since obviously the man isn’t going to be much of a—

Something comes flying at Derek. It’s dark and the size of his head, and he yelps and leaps out of the way so instead of hitting him in the flank, it smacks the ground instead. It’s heavy enough that the rime breaking under it sounds like shattering glass.

Derek lands better this time, crouched back on stiff legs as he growls at…the shepherd. Who must have thrown it, since there’s nobody else around, but the shepherd’s still not facing him. Instead the man’s just standing up, the sheep hefted in his arms—he’s wheezing from the effort—as he kicks the end of his staff out of the brush.

“Oh, look,” the man says, twisting slightly. “There’s a wolf. See, this is why you’re supposed to go _in_ when I call you.”

The sheep is looking straight at Derek, and Derek really doesn’t think he’s imagining the long-suffering look on its face. It lets out a weak little bleat, its legs dangling against the shepherd’s cloak.

“Well, anyway, I think we all got lucky today. You didn’t get eaten, even though you’re asking for it—” the shepherd gives the sheep an affectionate chuck as he starts staggering towards the fence “—and I still have my perfect record, and Mister Wolf there doesn’t discover the joys of eating worm-ridden mutton.”

Worm-ridden?

“I mean, he looks pretty hard up, with those ribs, but that’s just being sadistic,” the shepherd goes on. He nearly drops his staff, then the sheep, but he manages to unhook the gate. “If he’s gonna eat any of you, he should at least go for the nice, healthy ones who won’t give him a week of runs afterward. You know, the ones who don’t have the little blue dots on their ears because you guys really _do_ all look the same.”

Derek looks and the sheep does have dabs of blue dye on its ears. And now that he’s looking for it, its scent is a little heavy on shit, the way it’d be if it’s having intestinal issues. Not that that makes him any less hungry, because he is _starving_ , but…the shepherd and the sheep are halfway to the shed now. He could still chase after them and probably get them, but he doesn’t know what the shepherd keeps in the tower and at that distance the shepherd has a pretty good chance of making it inside.

Also, the shepherd is clearly not afraid of Derek, and that’s just…weird. The shepherd is weird, and it makes Derek nervous. And by the time Derek shakes that off, the shepherd is safely locked in the shed and it’s a moot point and Derek’s so annoyed at himself for losing the chance that he drops out of wolf form so he can smack at the side of his face.

Peter’s going to give it to him too, he thinks, and then his irritation abruptly cools to dull bitterness. Yeah, Peter will be mad, and Derek will just sit there and let him yell, and in the meantime they’re just dying by inches. Sometimes Derek wonders why they still bother trying.

For all that it matters, Derek could just keep sitting there; it doesn’t really matter where he starves. But it’s cold, and he guesses he’s just still that stubborn, and eventually he heaves himself up to go find Peter. Which is when the thing the shepherd threw at him knocks against his leg and he looks down and he realizes it smells like meat.

Derek gingerly picks it up. The thing is all wrapped up in paper and tied with string, double-knotted in a lopsided bow. He turns it over to sniff and a slick of grease seeps out onto his fingers. It’s rich and fatty and before he knows it, he’s got his finger in his mouth and is moaning.

Then he yanks it out. Sits there, huddled up with the thing in his hands, trying to tell if his fingers and toes have started tingling, or if he’s getting any burning pains in his gut—aside from the usual cramps—or any other sign of poisoning.

He doesn’t. But he keeps sitting there till a good hour later by the moonrise, he hears Peter howling for him to come back to the den.

* * *

Derek gets back first, and he’s staring at the unwrapped ham joint when Peter drops into the den, huffing and slapping at his thighs to warm them up. “What are you doing?” Peter says irritably. “If you _actually_ want to freeze to death—”

“Oh, yeah, I…” Had scraped up some more branches for a small fire, but then he’d figured he could use the paper to help start it, and had taken that off and gotten distracted because it’s _ham_.

Golden brown criss-crossed with dark red grooves, with broad ribbons of pearly fat that made Derek’s fingers tremble as he’d licked them off. It looks so good that he can’t trust himself to eat it, and honestly has just done nothing but poke it and wait for it to disappear.

Anyway, now that Peter’s back, Derek figures he can find out whether he’s going insane or not, and…Derek blinks hard. “What is that?”

Peter pulls himself up sharply, one hand darting up almost to his neck before he suddenly slaps it against the wall. He stands over Derek, looking as confused and embarrassed about it as Derek feels about the ham. Then he screws up his face into a wince and slowly sits down beside Derek.

“It’s a scarf,” Peter says. He blinks, then pulls it off his neck and tosses it between his hands as if he’s expecting to be proven wrong about that. He’s holding himself up like he’s making fun of Derek, but his tone isn’t superior at all. “Clearly. And—that—that—”

Derek pokes the joint again. “It’s ham. I don’t think it’s poisoned.”

They stare at the joint for about a minute. Then Peter takes a deep, slightly shaky breath. He puts out his hand to almost touch the ham, then twists away at the last second to grab the matches instead. He’s suddenly brisk, almost normal, striking one and then holding it to the crumpled paper till the flame catches. Bending over to blow the flames into a puny fire.

The ham starts to soften, and as it does, the den fills up with its glorious smell. Derek sucks back his drool and finds a plate to put it on so the fat won’t just run into the floor and be wasted.

“So he threw it at me,” Derek says. “The shepherd. He saw me, and he said the sheep I was going to eat had worms and I looked too skinny for that, and he threw it at me.”

Peter grunts in acknowledgement, but doesn’t say anything. Just gets up and gets some water for them to drink, and then helps Derek divide up the ham. They eat it without talking, just the occasional ravenous slurp. The fire starts to die—they didn’t have much time to collect fresh wood, what with jaunting over to the tower—and the two of them retreat to the bed. The scarf comes with them.

It’s made of wool, of course. Undyed so it already has a couple dirty spots that Peter fusses over, painstakingly picking the little specks out with his claws. It’s also sort of lumpy, and when Derek looks more closely, he sees that that’s because whoever spun the yarn didn’t do an even job, and whoever knitted it did an even clumsier one.

“What are you doing?” Peter hisses, slapping at Derek’s hand. Then he bundles the whole scarf under himself. It is long enough that he can loop some over his neck and still have plenty to puddle over his hands, and from the look on his face, it’s very warm.

“Where did you get that?” Derek says. “Did you steal his laundry?”

Peter looks oddly at him. “Did you _see_ any laundry outdoors?”

“Well, did you break in while I was behind the tower?” Derek says.

* * *

As often as Derek accuses Peter of being full of shit, Peter’s nephew insists on believing the most ridiculous things about Peter, to the point that it’s more of a liability than flattery. He seems to think that Peter has the vampire’s ability to turn into mist, the banshee’s ability to foretell the future, and the fairy’s ability to cast illusions, so there’s no need for them to take care to not get caught. No, no, uncle Peter will handle it, and never mind that every day Peter’s joints ache a little longer, the scratches heal a little slower.

“No, of course not,” Peter tells his idiot of a remaining family member. “We don’t know what kind of man he is, and what he’s capable of.”

Derek looks suspicious, but he stops trying to shred at the edges of the scarf, as if a quarter-full belly is going to give them enough energy to shiver through the night without any coverings. He presses his lips together and subsides into the bedding, hunching in his shoulders as a stray draft tries to ice the tops of their heads.

“Did you, you know, talk to him?” he finally asks.

Peter had been about to pillow down on the scarf, but he stops, still half-propped on his elbows, and can’t help an aggravated sigh. “Derek. We don’t know what he _does_.”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time, all right?” Derek twists over and glowers at the ceiling. Pulling the bedding away as he does, as if they haven’t long since found that the only way to keep them both covered is to curl up together. “I just—he was talking to the sheep, but I think he was talking to me too, and then just leaving that ham, and…so you stole that?”

Peter’s going to lie and say yes, but then his nephew turns back. Still irritable, far too free with his knees and elbows as he slots his limbs in between Peter’s, but when his head threatens to overrun the scarf, he snorts and humps it away. He’s so grudging about how he accommodates others, it’s almost amusing. Talia had never been able to get past that—she’d apologize to Peter but then point at her son’s little scowling face and poke Peter in the ribs and ask him, could _he_ take that seriously?

Yes, is what Peter would tell her now. He thinks, looking at his nephew, while Derek’s arm slides over Peter’s back and cinches the bedding a little closer around them.

“No,” Peter says instead. He rubs the scarf between his fingers, then shakes his hand free and touches his fingertips together to feel the oily trace the wool’s left on them. Then he sighs and unwinds the scarf from one arm, and floats it over Derek’s head, where one ear is slowly turning blue. “No. I didn’t. I went to that little—we thought it might be an outhouse.”

The only part of Derek that’s visible is his eyes, narrowed slightly under knitted brows. “So it’s not.”

“No, it’s a…I think it’s supposed to be a chicken house. It had the perches and the boxes, at any rate,” Peter says. He tilts his head in recollection. “No chickens yet. I think he might be keeping them with the sheep for now. Anyway, there was hay, and I was thinking about taking it out for us, and then I heard something fluttering outside. I thought maybe a wild bird was coming to roost that I could catch.”

Derek grimaces. “The only ones we ever catch are crows and buzzards, and you hate how they taste.”

“Yes, well, we can’t afford to pander to my tastes these days, can we?” Peter says sharply. Or to his temper, and he takes a few breaths, shuffles his elbows impotently in the bedding, and makes himself calm down. “Anyway, it wasn’t even a bird. It was this.”

He fluffs up the scarf. Derek’s eyes go to it, then to Peter. Then Derek presses himself up on one arm. “So he threw it at you?”

“No, I think you’re the only one so honored tonight. I didn’t see or hear him.” Peter pauses. “It was on a kite.”

“A kite,” Derek says. He purses his lips, and then works out his hand to make a vague flapping gesture. When Peter lets out an impatient noise, he glowers back, but keeps his tone fairly even as he changes to tracing out a diamond with his finger. “Like that kind of kite?”

“Yes.” After a second, Peter flips up a portion of the scarf onto his fingertips. He looks at it—wool—feels it—wool—and then holds it up to his nose for a whiff. 

Wool. Wool, and a woodsy, oily underscent, probably from the spinning wheel. Maybe a little rosemary, but there Peter isn’t sure his stomach is interfering. He likes a good roasted lamb, and perpetual hunger has twisted his senses so that he always goes about with the faint feeling that he isn’t quite solidly in this world, rather than one of his imaginings. 

“A kite,” Peter goes on, when he realizes Derek isn’t about to talk. “It was on a long string that went into one of the tower windows, and it had these movable flaps on extra strings that’d make it go down or up, and the scarf was hanging off of it and hitting the chicken-house. That’s what I heard.”

“You’re going to say it’s a stupid question, but did he stick a note on it?” Derek finally says.

Peter shakes his head. Derek starts to ask something else, but then dismisses it with a harsh jerk of his chin. He glances over like he expects Peter to chide him, and when Peter doesn’t, he eventually slides back into the bedding, though his eyes remain open and watchful.

“He obviously wanted me to take it,” Peter says after a long silence. “I didn’t see him, but the kite kept dropping, and it swerved once so the scarf practically hit me in the face. So I didn’t steal it. And as far as I can tell, it’s not magicked.”

“I guess that’s great, he doesn’t want to know what we’re going to do with it,” Derek mutters.

A flash of irritation slaps hotly through Peter, but even as he’s lifting himself, the icy air in the den recalls him to sense. He shivers, then goes still, staring down at the scarf. Derek nudges him twice, and he doesn’t ignore the man on purpose. Not that Derek believes him, when his nephew finally loses patience and hauls him back down, grumbling about letting in the cold and if Peter really wants to murder him, just get on with it already.

Peter doesn’t want to murder him. Sometimes Derek infuriates him to the point of murder, even now, when sheer proximity has forced an understanding between them, but that’s not what Peter _wants_. Not that Derek will believe that either, and that one, Peter can’t fault him, with all the dead lying between them.

“So you think he wants to talk to us?” Derek asks, idly mouthing Peter’s elbow.

When Peter looks down, Derek coils in on himself, then snorts and ducks his head back under the scarf. It sticks over his ear and drifts across his mouth, and the condensation from his breath is going to get it damp that way…Peter reaches over and brushes the scarf back to the top of Derek’s head, and then keeps his hand there, half-buried in his nephew’s thick hair. “Did you want to talk to him?”

“Do you always have to make my questions about me?” Derek mutters, before he turns his face into the bed. He’s still very handsome, even in such poor condition; the lines of his cheekbones and jaw lend themselves to the severity starvation brings.

They’ve always had good bones, their family. Peter’s heard that countless times from countless people, till they’ve all jumbled together in his head, and he starts to think that instead what was said was that they make good bones. Good skeletons, good dead trophies, and then that rage flares up in him, white-hot but cold. Just as cold as the deepening winter on the mountain, something that nothing, not exile, not abject poverty, not black magic can kill. Something he still has, despite it all.

He _will_ live. And Derek will too, because Peter wants that, and he will keep what he has left no matter how stupid his nephew is. “It’s not about you, Derek. It’s about whether you’re going to stick with me so we can do this properly, or whether I’ll be working around you as usual.”

“I don’t—” Derek starts, snarling, a hint of glow even coming into his eyes. But his temper doesn’t last these days, just flickers of the old rash boy. Starvation, of all things, is what’s taught him patience. “Look, just what are you thinking? We’re going back there, right?”

“Well, it _is_ the only source of decent food around here,” Peter says, and as he speaks the memory of the ham rises up and makes his mouth water. He has to stop and rub at his lips, and then push his hand down to press at his still-cramping belly. “Strange or not, if we’re going to survive this winter, we’ll have to deal with him.”

Derek frowns. “So we’re talking to him?”

“No,” Peter says, just holding back an eyeroll. “Are you insane? At what point in your life has it ever seemed like a good idea to talk to strangers? Didn’t we teach you—”

“Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m saying,” Derek says. Looking at the scarf, and then, as if he doesn’t trust Peter to interpret that, he stretches his head out so he can look pointedly at the ham bone sticking out of their waste bucket. “So we aren’t talking to him. We’re just going after his sheep.”

“Put crudely, yes,” Peter says. “Objections?”

Derek grunts and pulls his head in, turtle-like. “And if he gives us more stuff—”

“Well, if it’s useful, take it, but we’re not bargaining with him,” Peter says. “If he wants to waste his resources, that’s one thing, but we’re already living on a cursed mountain, Derek. Just how much more miserable do you want to make our lives?”

“Fine, fine, I was just checking,” Derek grumbles. “So when are we going back?”

“Well, when do you want to eat?” Peter asks.

* * *

Peter doesn’t read too much into the ham or the scarf. True, the shepherd had obviously come prepared, but that doesn’t mean he came prepared specifically for them. He just had bribes ready for the type of monster who might come creeping around a sheepfold located on a haunted, freezing mountain. And Peter does think they’re bribes.

It makes the most sense. The shepherd has skills that probably include strong magic, but he’s just one person and he’s done an enormous amount of work in a very short time. He’s not in a good position to pick fights, so he’s trying to avoid a confrontation. It’s a very sound strategy, and if Peter were better fed, he’d admire it.

But he’s not, so once their few daily chores are seen to, he and Derek head back over to the tower.

This time he sends Derek scouting down the mountainside to try and find the path the shepherd had taken to get here, both to make sure the shepherd is truly alone and to see if there are any clues to his identity. Derek’s the stronger of the two and has the strength to deal with the terrain, while Peter has the observational skills for picking up anything of note at the tower, and that’s so obvious that Derek doesn’t argue much.

“What happens if he comes out and tries to talk?” Derek asks. “What if I come back here and you’re not around?”

“Well, first of all, we agreed that there would be no talking,” Peter says. “Second, if I’m not here, I’d hope you would _not_ just storm in and get yourself killed, but would do the sensible thing and find my body and then avenge me properly.”

Derek makes a face at him. “This isn’t actually reassuring me.”

“ _Third_ ,” Peter says. “Third. Do you actually think I’m going to do anything stupid? If anybody should be worrying about not seeing somebody again, it should be me, since you can’t seem to keep track of the moon to _literally_ , Derek, literally save your life—”

“It’s a whole week to the new moon, I could get my leg broken in an avalanche and still have time to drag myself back to the den,” Derek snaps.

Peter rolls his eyes, because his nephew is _dramatic_ , and pretends he didn’t feel a cold twinge in his chest, because drama or not, Derek says that because he’s proven it to be fact. “Just try not to make me find you, all right? And if you happen to come across another lost sheep—”

“Yeah, yeah, though I think that’s your job, up here,” Derek mutters, just before shifting and loping off.

Likewise, Peter slinks around till he finds himself a well-positioned bush just outside of the front pasture, and takes up watch. The sheep have already been shown out of the shed and dot the grass here and there, calmly munching away. Some of them are huddled around a haybale that’s had a large hole eaten into the middle of it, while others poke their heads into a halved barrel that appears to be serving as a sort of manger.

The shepherd isn’t there, but the door to the tower is open—propped that way with what looks like a stack of books—and within a few minutes of Peter settling down, he walks out with a bucket of water in either hand. He proceeds to empty the buckets into the manger, chatting with the sheep as he does about whether he should fix that hole in the back pasture fence or wait till the coming storm passes, and then he walks back inside.

Peter frowns at the mention of the storm. The weather is very changeable this high, hard to predict even for a werewolf, but he’s fairly confident it’ll be clear till nightfall. Otherwise, as desperately as they need the food, he and Derek wouldn’t have ventured out. Storms up here aren’t to be taken lightly.

He mulls that over as the shepherd makes two more trips with the buckets. After the last trip, the shepherd goes into the tower again, but so briefly that he can’t have gone much past the threshold. When he reappears, the man has his crook, a little sack that Peter assumes is his lunch, and a book.

The shepherd goes over to the haybale, which has mostly been abandoned by the sheep, and drops off the sack and the book. He walks around the fence, occasionally banging it with his staff. Once he stops and uses the staff to root up a clump of nettles—he knows enough to realize that here, those will give you violent hallucinations—which he then flings over the fence. Then he walks on till he’s done the whole circuit. 

He talks to himself the whole time. Mostly about how nice his sheep are, how well they’ve done over the fall, putting on good weight and fattening up for the cold days. How their wool is soft and thick and makes wonderful blankets. Occasionally he digresses—and when he does, they’re in the most random directions, from botany to comparative laws of the hunt to the only correct way to make dumplings—but he keeps coming back to how his sheep are the _perfect_ target for a predator.

Peter stays put. He has to chew grass, dry and bitter and salty as the winter winds have made it, to keep his stomach from growling at the shepherd’s descriptions of the kinds of sausages his sheep make, but he doesn’t move an inch.

When the shepherd finishes his trip around the pasture, he returns to the haybale. It’s a bright, sunny day, and even though Peter would disagree, the shepherd seems to think it’s warmed up. He takes off his cloak, revealing that the clothes underneath are just as baggy and prone to get in his way, and drapes it over the end of the bale. Then he leans his crook against the bale’s side, plops down on the cloak, and picks up the book and starts reading aloud from it.

At first Peter listens with interest, but it quickly becomes clear that the book is nothing more than a bunch of children’s tales, and fairly common ones at that. Nothing will give Peter any idea where the man’s from. Though there is one thing—the _sheep_ seem to be enjoying them. One by one, they start drifting over till they’ve formed a loose circle around the haybale.

Well, they’re sheep, and if they’re all so distracted, Peter doesn’t have to be quite so careful of the wind as he sneaks out of his bush and around the pasture. As he told Derek, he has no intention of going inside, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do a little reconnoitering as to the tower’s interior.

There’s a small stretch of open land between the pasture and the tower. It’s oddly placed, since nothing’s there to stop the shepherd from connecting the pasture directly with the sheepfold itself, and while it’s not more than a few yards wide, that’s still a few yards where every morning he has to watch for strays as he’s moving them out. If you don’t know the grounds, that is—Peter has explored the ruins quite thoroughly and so he happens to know that that stretch is very thinly laid over with turf. Only a few inches underneath lies an old cobblestone road, built back in the days when roads were meant to wear down over centuries.

He imagines that the shepherd tried it and found it was too much trouble to drive the fence-posts into the stones. At any rate, the fact that there’s no fence means that Peter can walk right up to the lowest of the windows without having to force his way. And on that side, the manger and a few coarse bushes even provide him cover for most of the distance.

There’s just the matter of when he raises his head to look in the window, but the shepherd has his back to Peter and so it should just be a matter of timing. After all, Peter’s not going to stand there mooning all day; he just wants a few quick looks to spot any obvious problems, like weapons or alchemical equipment.

Peter gets to the window without any trouble, and as the shepherd relates some silly tale about a fox and a hen, he pops his head over the windowsill. He’s rather surprised at what he finds: while the inside’s clearly been fixed up, it’s rough, simple work, exactly the kind of repairs that…well, that a shepherd with enough time and supplies would make. There’s still no way that the shepherd did it all in such a short time without some kind of supernatural aid, but if the man was going through all that trouble, Peter just can’t see why he wouldn’t make it nicer.

No weapons either that Peter can see, aside from what looks like another crook, half-carved and leaning against the wall, and everyday workman’s tools. On the other hand, he does see an unusually large number of crates and chests. They’re all neatly stacked and pushed up against the wall, and…

His ear catches a suspicious movement and he immediately drops from the window to crouch behind the firewood pile. He can still hear the shepherd reading, and the odd bleat indicates that the sheep aren’t alarmed either, and he finally risks a glance over, only to find that everything’s as it was except that the shepherd has undone his sack and is munching on an apple.

Apples. Apples do not grow on this mountain. Peter sniffs, pauses, and then sniffs again. Then, concentrating as hard as he can, takes a deep, deep breath and then holds it till he’s sure he’s gotten every single scent it has.

And they don’t include scents that he knows he should be getting. He can see that apple, but he can’t smell it in the house. He can see books, but he doesn’t smell those either, and he’s standing right under a window. Definitely magic, although Peter’s been keeping an eye out and he hasn’t seen a rune or even a common charm like a horseshoe. He paws absently at the ground, thinking that over, and that’s when he smells the roast chicken.

Peter’s stomach lets out a loud rumble, and then cramps viciously on him when he tries to flatten down to muffle it against the ground. He jerks around, fangs bared, but…no, they’re still reading.

Roast chicken. It seems to be coming from the next window over. However, seeing as Peter only has just started smelling it, and chickens don’t instantaneously roast, and he’s already noticed…he’s kicking himself inside, but he’s already swung about and is slinking over to check. Just to check. It might be an illusion.

It’s not an illusion. There’s a roast chicken sitting on the sill of the open window. Sitting there. Still steaming. 

Peter looks back at the pasture—no change—and then looks up at the chicken. He ducks his head and wipes at his slavering jaw with the side of his foreleg, then looks up again, searching the window frame for any signs of magic. When he doesn’t see any, he eases up and, doing his best to ignore the chicken, peers around it into the tower. He already noticed that the shepherd hadn’t bothered to put up dividers, but had just left it as one open space, with the different functions of each area blending into each other. This side seems to be the kitchen—a large firepit is in the center of the space—with boxes of root vegetables laid out on some crates, a big water barrel, bunches of herbs hanging along the wall to dry, a sheep—

A sheep. Staring quizzically at Peter, its forefeet planted on the sill just behind the chicken, its hindlegs on a stool. A bowl of melted butter with a paintbrush is sitting on a crate near it.

Peter immediately and silently drops from the window. He blinks hard, then whips around and the shepherd is _gone_ , and he twists back around and springs for the woods, and he can see a clear path to them, he didn’t forget to leave himself that—and then the earth drops right out from under him.

Shock makes him shift, and he lands in the bottom of the pit as a man, breathless, still so mindlessly set on fleeing that he nearly tosses himself straight into the pit wall. And then his hands seem to sink right into the floor and he loses his balance, and gets a—a mouthful of canvas and hay, the stalks stabbing past his fangs into the roof of his mouth, and there are…are mattresses. Mattresses?

“Oh, man, I’m glad I went with the extra layer of sacks,” says a voice above him. “You guys shift out way bigger than you look, though I guess that’s the whole starvation thing working for you. On the other hand, it’s still kind of weird that the mass-shifting doesn’t…sorry, sorry, right, I should explain I’m not going to kill you and all that. So, um, I’m not. Hi.”

Peter spits out the straw and pushes off the mattress, and looks up. The shepherd waves at him.

He stares back. The shepherd cocks his head, then takes his crook from where it’s lying across his knees. The pit is too deep for it, but even so, Peter immediately presses himself against the far wall, snarling.

The shepherd blinks, stops with the crook only a few inches above his knees, and then he cocks his head the other way. He looks at the staff and then at Peter, and then he shrugs and swing the staff around to tuck under one arm, with the majority of it pushed back behind him. “Well, look, you’re still a werewolf, even if you look like a pretty pathetic example of one,” he says, almost apologetic. “So I’m not going to ditch the staff. But I hope you’ve noticed there’s a complete lack of mountain ash or wolfsbane going on here.”

Peter opens his mouth to point out that yes, he has, but he’s still in a _pit_ so forgive him if he doesn’t quite trust the man’s intentions. And then he catches himself, sucking back in the start of that first word and then sealing his lips together. Derek—is not going to hear about this, and they really have been staying far too long with each other if that’s the first thing Peter worries about.

“I’m not going to kill you,” the shepherd says again, after a few minutes have passed. He shifts and his sleeves flop over his hands, and he makes a face and tucks them back. Then he frowns like he’s just remembered something and starts rummaging around in his clothes. “Okay, then, you’re going to be like that…I mean, not that I blame you, obviously if you’re living in this kind of place, you’re going to have some trust issues, on top of being regularly hunted down and killed, and I’m not really being all that reassuring, am I? Sorry. I spend a lot of time on my own. It can get kind of weird, you know?”

He even looks down at Peter like he expects an answer. Peter barely has time to twist back from where he’d started examining the pit to pretend like he was being attentive, and from the amused expression on the shepherd’s face, it wasn’t worth the effort.

“You look worse than that other guy,” the shepherd says suddenly. He takes out what looks like a flute from his shirt, and then settles into a cross-legged sit at the edge of the pit. A sheep bleats and he glances over his shoulder, then calls that he’ll be back in a few minutes, just relax. “I mean, I didn’t see him shifted out, but it’s pretty obvious there are two of you. There’s no way you got from the front to the back that fast, not with all the ribs you’ve got showing.”

Peter suppresses his urge to swear and rave at the shepherd and instead drops all pretenses of not doing his damnedest to figure out how to get out of the pit. The sides are extremely steep, almost perfectly vertical, and he knows from experience that it’ll be difficult to force his claws into the hard-packed, half-frozen soil. It’s too narrow to allow him a running start, but not so deep that he couldn’t try a standing jump. On the other hand, with his current condition, he can’t be sure he’d make the edge.

“So where’s the other guy?” the shepherd asks, fiddling with the flute. “Did you guys like the ham? I think they put too much sugar in the cure, and I _have_ a sweet tooth, and I was kind of worried that mandatory meat-eaters wouldn’t go for it, but then again, you look like you’d eat _me_ if I let you.”

The other problem with a standing jump is that Peter certainly won’t be able to take off right away. He’ll need at least a few seconds to right himself, if he even makes the edge, and that will leave him vulnerable. He squints up at the sun and thinks about howling for Derek, but no, even if he thought Derek wouldn’t panic, his howling would put the shepherd on alert for Derek’s approach.

“Again, given the way you look, I can understand. I don’t know that I’d say I sympathize, because, well, cannibalism, gross, but I’m not a werewolf and anyway, obviously we need to get over the eating me thing first,” the shepherd says. “So remember to take the chicken with you, all right?”

Peter twists back around just in time to see the shepherd’s cheeks puff out around the flute. Which is not a flute, it’s a blowpipe, and he slaps his hand against his shoulder too late to block the prick of the dart there. “You said you aren’t trying to kill me!” he snaps.

The shepherd starts, lets the flute fall from his mouth, and then yelps and bats frantically at it till he manages to smack it back into his lap with a fold of his sleeve. Then he leans down and looks at Peter with a delighted expression. “Oh, hey, you talked!”

“You—” Peter yanks the dart out of his shoulder and tries to throw it away from him, but his arm is suddenly full of lead and instead he watches it thud against the wall “—you—what was—”

“Well, it’s not _wolfsbane_ , do you look like you’ve got black blood?” the shepherd says. He’s getting up onto his feet, and doing other things, and Peter can’t see because he’s sunk to his knees and has to lean his head against the wall to stop it from spiraling off his neck. “Just lie down, all right? I mean, those are bruises, right? Is your healing even working? Don’t bash around and break something you can’t heal.”

“You miserable—I’ll—eat you, don’t be—you poisoned—I’ll rip you apart and let the _birds_ eat you—” Peter snarls. Tries to snarl. His jaw keeps going askew and he can barely understand the resulting slur.

“See,” the shepherd sighs. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

And that’s the last thing Peter remembers for…oh, at least an hour. By the time he wakes up again, groggy, his head feeling like somebody’s excavated it and restuffed it with wet cotton, dark is falling. An icy breeze is blowing across him, and every time he tries to huddle away from it into the warm blanket, somebody shakes his shoulder.

“…Peter. Peter! Peter, damn it,” they hiss, before making a frustrated, desperate noise. “Shit. Shit. Shit, Peter, wake up. Wake up, all right, I can’t—are you serious, I’m supposed to go get this guy with his stupid _sheep_ and kill him just because you—you’re napping—”

“I’m _not_ napping, I’m—” Peter growls, heaving himself up.

He’s…not in a pit. Derek, dodging the swipe Peter makes at him, hops back a yard and snarls back. Then drops into a squat, wrapping his arms around himself. He breathes out in relief, shakes some grass from his claws, and shifts into wolf form.

Peter ignores him, and continues to look around them. They’re on a little hillock some distance from the tower, though Peter can still see it—he immediately looks that way, once he’s oriented himself. The sheep have been taken in for the night, and so has the haybale, and as for the pit…he doesn’t see it, but he can just make out what looks like a layer of planks where the hole should be.

Derek whines curiously, and when Peter doesn’t answer, he shifts human. Clears his throat, pauses, and then shuffles over to give Peter an impatient poke on the arm. “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the…what do you _think_ is the matter?” Peter hisses. He pulls himself up into a sitting position. The blanket that’d been wrapped around him slips off his shoulders, and he nearly tears some muscles reaching for it and then yanking his hands back when he realizes what he’s doing.

The blanket pools over his lap and he looks at it. Wool again. Knitted squares, and from the quality of the workmanship—functional but crude—it was made by the same hand or hands as made the scarf from the other night. It’s quite warm.

“I was heading back to the den and smelled you, and you smelled off so I came over to see, and you were all rolled up in that,” Derek offers. He’s clipping his words and Peter starts to tell him that it’s hardly fair to blame Peter for that, and then Peter realizes that Derek’s not resentful so much as fighting back shivers. “Look, we need to get going. It’s going to storm again, don’t you smell it? And I think it’s going to be snow this time.”

Peter takes a deep breath and realizes that Derek is right. And so is the shepherd—he’d said, Peter thinks. Grips sharply at the blanket before he can help it, and then he shakes himself. Mutters what little charms he can work these days, and when nothing on the blanket lights up, he…he bundles it up to take it along. He’s going to regret that choice, no doubt, but damn it, it is _warm_. Taking it off feels like going from the comfortable embrace of a body-sized hot water bottle to an ocean of ice.

“When we get there, we can see if he did something to you,” Derek adds. Instead of reassuring, he sounds uncertain and afraid, and when Peter looks at him, he scowls over his nerves. “Come on.”

“Here, you carry it,” Peter says, handing him the blanket. “I’m too tired. I’m barely going to be able to shif—wait.”

“What?” Derek says, voice sharpening with angry fear. “Peter, damn it, don’t you think you’ve seen enough of him for one day?”

“I’m not even looking that way. It’s just that he said something,” Peter mutters, sniffing.

Derek lets out an annoyed laugh. “I knew it. You two talked. You always do that, and seriously, Peter, why? Even when we actually _had_ something to negotiate with, it’s not like the other side ever held up their end, so why you think we can still bargain—”

“I don’t, and we didn’t talk, he just said don’t forgot the…” Peter reaches out and pokes flips aside what looks like just more scrubby turf, at first, but actually proves to be a mat woven out of dried grass.

He looks at the roast chicken sitting under it, then at Derek. Who shifts nervously from foot to foot, chewing his lip, before abruptly stooping and picking up the chicken.

“We need to eat. I didn’t find a damn thing crawling all over the mountain today,” Derek says, jutting his chin like he thinks he’ll have to challenge Peter into agreeing.

Peter nearly rolls his eyes, but now that Derek’s mentioned it, his own stomach has started up complaining again. So he doesn’t waste the effort, and merely shakes himself into wolf form for the trip back to the den.

* * *

The chicken is ridiculously good, and takes almost no time for Derek and Peter to reduce to just some bones that Peter insists on boiling in water. Derek understands that’s how you make broth, but he always thought that that only worked if you left something to make broth with, and they’ve even cracked the bigger bones to pick at the scant amount of marrow with their claws.

After they eat, Peter also insists on tearing apart their bedding and sorting through it, picking out the scraps that are too threadbare for any use and tossing them on the fire. The new blanket more than makes up for it, but it still seems a little frivolous for them to be doing.

Peter doesn’t want to talk about whatever happened, that’s what he’s doing. Usually he’s happy to tell Derek all the details Derek doesn’t need or want to know about what he’s been through, but once in a while he clams up. When he’s like that, you have to go out and find somebody else who was there to find out what happened. Or be Derek’s mother, who’s dead.

Since he isn’t talking and snow has started to fall, so Derek goes back outside to make sure their airholes will stay clear, and to get some extra firewood. It’s so cold that he has to slap himself to keep the blood moving, but two straight days of food has given him enough energy that he almost doesn’t notice the effort that takes. When he gets back inside, he has to sit by the fire to warm up, but for once it doesn’t feel like he’s just passing time before they go to sleep. He actually can feel his muscles thawing out.

“Derek,” Peter says. He’s mostly put the bed back together, and is sitting on it with one leg pulled over the other, pulling at his thigh like he’s trying to find something on it. “Come over here and help with this.”

“With what?” Derek asks, but he goes over.

Peter gives him a sharp look, but it’s brittle, just the motion without real anger behind it. Then Peter pushes down the blankets to show him the leg. “Look at this.”

Derek looks. He doesn’t see anything, and he’s about to say so when the fire suddenly flares up—Derek even grabbed a few pinecones when he was out, and they’ve caught—and the staccato of its popping makes Peter tense up. That’s when he realizes what Peter’s looking at: the lack of marks. Peter’s healed from the fire that killed most of their family, but only on the outside, since they were on the run and short of the wolfsbane they needed. He still has scar tissue under his skin, keeping him weaker than he should be, which shows up as a faint white webwork when he’s pushed himself.

But it’s gone now. Peter flexes his leg, rotates his knee, and none of it shows up. Then he lets go of his thigh and lifts his hands, flexing their fingers. “My joints don’t hurt like they usually do. I’m tired, but…just tired.”

“What happened?” Derek asks, before he can think.

He grimaces and immediately backs off, expecting Peter to snap at him, but…the other man just looks thoughtful. And then Peter starts…starts touching himself all over, sticking his hands under his arms, feeling down his legs and then up between them, pushing his balls aside as he gropes at his own buttocks. He doesn’t look or smell aroused, just puzzled, and when he finally stops, he drops back and brings his hands around to sniff and then looks even more puzzled.

“Does it smell—you said I smelled different?” Peter says.

“Off,” Derek corrects. He tries to remember, because Peter’s going to ask him that next, but between getting back to the den with a strangely quiet uncle, and then the blissful feeling of real food in his stomach, the memory’s faded. “You still smelled like you, just…just like you’d been sick. Not like you _were_ sick, like you’d been.”

“So I smelled healthier?” Peter says, looking up sharply. Then he starts touching his legs again. “Does it smell like anything was rubbed on me? Like a salve?”

“Not really,” Derek says. “Why?”

Peter presses his lips together and Derek thinks the man isn’t going to answer. But then Peter sighs and looks away. His hand goes up to one shoulder. “Well, that wouldn’t have done it,” he says, mostly to himself. “Barely in for a second.”

“What was?” Derek says. “What’d he do?”

**Author's Note:**

> I marathoned _Shaun the Sheep_ over the holidays and desperately want to write a story where Derek and Peter are trying to stalk Stiles' flock and Stiles is casually thwarting them, but I can't get the tone I want. I wanted something along the lines of [Werewolf How-To](http://archiveofourown.org/series/353873), but my sense of humor hasn't been cooperating lately, so I tried writing it out as a drama with black humor flourishes. Which is what is above, and which was not working out.
> 
> So, junked it here, and I have some chill time coming up that I guess I'll be spending trying to figure out how to rejigger this idea. Because I do think it's a potential comedy mine.


End file.
